Why Salesforce and Microsoft have invested heavily in Insidesales

Hunting Cloud Net Note: The big Data Age, the wind and cloud four, each road master, and so on. Who can Zhuluzhongyuan, eminence, is still a big variable. The protagonist of this article Insidesales is a large data into an auxiliary decision-making tool company, although it can not ensure that it will be able to go out of chaos, but can get Salesforce and Microsoft's favor, also absolutely can not be underestimated.

Insidesales.com, a member of the Wall Street Journal's billionaire start-up club, has recently been on the limelight. It raised 60 million of billions of dollars from Salesforce and Microsoft in the latest fundraising campaign.

The company, which comes from Utah State Provo, mainly provides data analysis software for Salesforce, which can predict the most likely time to buy by analyzing a lot of data. The company previously financed 139 million of billions of dollars in a fund-raising campaign, valuing about $1 billion trillion. According to Dave Elkington, chief executive, Insidesales's valuation has now exceeded $1.5 billion trillion.

The most striking of the fundraising is the ability to gain Salesforce and Microsoft investments at the same time, after all, the two industry giants were once rivals, a situation that changed only last year. Last year, Nadra took over the reins of Microsoft from Ballmer's hands, and in May, Nadra and Salesforce's chief executive, Marc Benioff, announced a partnership between two companies.

The two companies have promised to the public that they will cooperate in a friendly and "place customers first." The plan at the time was to make two key software compatible and to create a more efficient working environment for our customers. Now the two companies seem to be investing together again.

Elkington said: "This is a real balance, with the two very important ecosystems to merge, the biggest beneficiaries will be countless like us users." ”

Insidesales initially did not expect to be able to get more money, but their expectations changed as they took part in the Salesforce Company's annual client meeting Dreamforce. At the meeting, other executives at Benioff and Salesforce noticed that Insidesales could create more business, giving insidesales a rare opportunity.

Benioff let Elkington to Salesforce executives to show the company's quarterly business Report, then put forward the investment intention, the price is far higher than the Salesforce has invested in the "nominal amount."

At the same time, Insidesales is also working with Microsoft to negotiate. In the previous financing round, Microsoft was interested in investing in insidesales, and in the negotiations, Elkington also showed Nadra the company's software.

Elkington said: "I do not want to sell my business, after all, this is my flesh." I've always wanted to build a big enough and effective thing to change the world, so I think it's unwise to work with Salesforce. ”

Although two companies want to invest more money, they are willing to invest together. Investors in the open market have heard about the financing and are actively involved. Elkington has rejected billions of dollars of investments, and he finally fixed the end of the deal on a suitable figure, both to the benefit of his own company and to the lack of dilution of investors ' stakes.

The new funds will be used to further integrate Insidesales software with Salesforce and Microsoft products to create new products for customers. Some executives, for example, dislike phone harassment, they prefer to reply to text messages, and some companies prefer to check emails late at night and probably fancy a product at that time. These actions can be queried through Microsoft's outlook and Salesforce history. Insidesales products have a "continuous learning" algorithm layer, they will affect the various factors of sales behavior together, these factors range, including all aspects of life, from the weather to the local gas prices, all-encompassing. Finally, the insidesales will collect the massive sales interaction data and the external resources data together, and import into the platform of their own analysis.

Elkington said: "The predictive platform we develop is proactive and can predict what people are going to buy, in addition to predicting buyers and their buying possibilities." ”

Insidesales has built some cloud computing infrastructure, such as a new data center in Virginia State and a telecoms cloud hub in Europe. The new funds will also be invested in these infrastructures. Elkington also said that because Salesforce and Microsoft have a wide range of customers around the world, this will also accelerate Insidesales's international expansion.

The main financing is the Salesforce company, the remaining investors involved in the financing include Polaris, Kleiner Perkins caufield&byers, Hummer Winblad U.s.venture, Zetta and Venture.

Source:wsj